Chayei Sarah: The Legacy of Our Foremother
This week's Torah portion starts out with a seemingly cruel little morbid joke. The first significant words in our parashah are 'Chayei Sarah,' meaning 'The Life of Sarah,' and so
you might think you're about to learn of Sarah's childhood, her relationship with Abraham, her experience of motherhood, and maybe the challenges, successes, hopes, and dreams that all contributed to making her the woman that she was. Sadly, the very first sentence of the Torah portion informs us of Sarah's death. Seems a little inappropriate, no? Is the Torah trying to make an off-color joke, at Sarah's expense? Or perhaps there's something much more significant going on under the surface.
What does the Torah mean by 'The Life of Sarah'? In context, it seems mainly to be referring to age, to the years of her life. That first sentence just tells us that she was 127 years old when she died. But we've read
about LOTS of other people dying in the Torah, and the text never otherwise uses the term 'The life of (so-and-so)' in this way. Earlier in Genesis, we were told that various people 'lived' - 'va-yechi' - to a certain age, and we also saw that 'the days of' (kol yamei) a person's life were counted. Later, when Moses died at the end of Deuteronomy, we were told that he was a hundred and twenty years old when he died (34:7), but even then, the term 'the life of' was not used to describe Moses' death. So clearly something ELSE is going on in our text.
I think we're really talking about Sarah's legacy. Our parashah primarily focuses on her son, Isaac; the beginning of his story, and the record of his family. We never really learned much about Sarah in earlier stories.
We knew she lived most of her life childless, and it seemed to be a source of great consternation for her. It seems plausible to assume that she feared no one would pass along her values and ideals. For her, Isaac represented the future, the endless possibilities of generations of descendants, still talking about her millennia later. And indeed, here we are. In that way, our Torah portion truly does BEGIN - and not end - the story of the life of Sarah.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about vision and long-range planning. Conversations have begun, here at Ohev Shalom, about what we're doing, where we're going, and how we'll get there. What is community all about? What do people want to get out of their membership, and what can, and should, we be doing for them? We tend to let ourselves get
distracted by problems that exist right now, and which may seem urgent and pressing. But that also gives us a free pass to stop thinking about bigger pictures, meta-levels, and mission statements. And I'm not just talking on an organizational level. What about YOU, and your own life? Do you have a vision for where you'll be seven years from now, twenty years from now, maybe A HUNDRED years from now?? You may want to respond, 'that's crazy! Surely I won't be alive in a hundred years!' Except that shouldn't really limit you, should it? I mean, it didn't stop Sarah. Every moment of every day, your legacy is at stake. It's time to think big, to dream big! What do you want your descendants to say about you; what do you want them to LEARN from you? Thinking about these types of questions is truly the difference between just living, and having our entire existence celebrate the idea of being alive. Here's to Sarah: L'Chaim!
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